Paul Edwards

I'm Director of the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS) and a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford. 

I'm also Professor of Information and History (Emeritus) at the University of Michigan, where I worked for almost 20 years in the School of Information, the Dept. of History, and the STS Program. I taught previously at Stanford from 1992-1998 in various capacities, mainly in the Science, Technology & Society Program that I now direct.

I study the history, politics, and culture of information infrastructures, especially climate knowledge systems. My books include A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010), The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996), and Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001, co-edited with Clark Miller). With Geof Bowker, I'm academic editor of the MIT Press book series Infrastructures.  

I currently serve as one of over 900 lead authors for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to be released in 2021.